The Feminist Pedagogy Podcast
The Feminist Pedagogy Podcast – developed by Maéva Thibeault in collaboration with Prerna Singh and GENDER.ED - is a series of conversations with educators at the University of Edinburgh about teaching, power, and learning differently. It explores how feminist pedagogy can reshape classrooms through collaboration, critical reflection, and attention to lived experience.
Click here to listen to the podcast episodes on Spotify
What is Feminist Pedagogy?
Feminist pedagogy is a praxis (a practice underpinned by theory) that challenges mainstreamed approaches to teaching and learning. It troubles didactic paradigms of education (which position learners as passive recipients of a universal knowledge) and invites a more curious, collaborative, critical, and creative mode of learning.
Feminist pedagogy is attentive to the power dynamics of classrooms and society more broadly, to the diverse social location of students. Educators are attentive to consciousness-raising; they support students in recognising power dynamics, locate themselves socially, and understand feminist concerns in relation to their own positionalities, trajectories, and experiences. In other words, educators help students to identify the concrete realities of gender (in)justice in their day-to-day lives.
Feminist pedagogy takes up broader institutional commitments to inclusivity and accessibility, but reimagines these commitments in ways that trouble rather than stabilise traditional and economic models of education. For feminism, inclusivity and accessibility should ask: whose lives get curricular focus and whose knowledge is treated as valuable?
Background to the Podcast
In 2024, GENDER.ED’s flagship undergraduate course, Understanding Gender in the Contemporary World (UGCW), became one of a small number of pilot ‘Challenge Courses’ at the University of Edinburgh. Since it first ran in 2016, UGCW has been a pioneeringly large, cross-University, interdisciplinary course, with a vision to empower students as agents of change – all characteristics of Challenge Courses.
When the course received this designation, UGCW co-organisers Hemangini Gupta and Becky Hewer were encouraged to identify obstacles to the course’s long-term sustainability and potential growth. A key challenge they identified was the continuing availability of appropriately trained tutorial staff.
UGCW was founded on the principles of feminist pedagogy, and its tutorial design and assessments reflect this early commitment. To meet the aims of the course, tutors must be familiar and comfortable with feminist pedagogy as practice. Tutor recruitment and training processes designed for traditional courses do not meet the demands of UGCW.
Gupta and Hewer were awarded funding to develop specialist tutor training resources. Two PhD students, Maéva Thibeault and Prerna Singh, were employed to undertake this work. They did so by curating resources, running a training workshop, and producing the podcast featured here.
The podcast is intended as a resource for anyone interested in feminist pedagogy as a practice in UK Higher Education or beyond. It may be useful as a resource to support tutor training, or a more general starting point from which to explore feminist pedagogy.
Feminist Pedagogy Resources
Listeners who want to know more about the complexities, challenges, and promise of feminist pedagogy may wish to read/listen to the following open access resources, curated by Prerna Singh.
Podcast:
The Pedagogy of Feminism Podcast (on Spotify)
The Pedagogy of Feminism Podcast (on Apple)
Articles:
Forging Queer Feminist Futures Through Discomfort: Vulnerability and Authority in the Classroom - Órla Meadhbh Murray and Lisa Kalayji
Feminist pedagogy in action: reflections from the front line of feminist activism - the feminist classroom - Jenny Louise-Lawrence
Feminist pedagogy in the neoliberal university: on violence, vulnerability and radical care - Eleanor Wilkinson
Pedagogies of Discomfort and Care: Balancing Critical Tensions in Delivering Gender-Related Violence Training to Youth Practitioners - Fin Cullen and Michael Whelan
Zine Pedagogies: Students as Critical Makers - Jeanne Scheper